Non/understanding QM

Running head: Non/understanding QM

Quantum Mechanics:
To Understand or Not Understand; that is the Superposition

Seth T. Miller
California Institute of Integral Studies

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Abstract
This essay explores the relationship between everyday experience and quantum mechanics.
Does an understanding of quantum mechanical principles have an effect on an average persons
life? Do we even understand quantum mechanics, and if so, does such an understanding change
our lived epistemology? Or must our epistemology be forever locked to the scale of experiences
that occupy our normal experiences of the world? Both sides of the issue are explored.

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Quantum Mechanics:
To Understand or Not Understand; that is the Superposition

About 100 years ago the birth of quantum theory changed forever how humans perceive
the universe sort of. Certainly quantum physics is a phrase found far outside the boundaries
of physics classrooms, and has even achieved a fairly wide popularity through movies such as
What the Bleep as well as more scholarly works like Fritjof Capras Tao of Physics. Does this
mean, for the average person who has at least been introduced to some basic ideas from quantum
mechanics, that reality will never be the same? Or do ideas from quantum mechanics (QM)
remain something of a curiosityfascinating and mind-boggling but so far removed from
normal everyday experience as to be essentially irrelevant?
Take a moment and ponder this question for yourself. Can you remember how you were
affected when you first heard of electron tunneling, the EPR paradox, entanglement, the
uncertainty principle, or more likely, Schrodingers cat? Did your view of the world change? A
more relevant question might be: how do you know? Perhaps the next time you looked at the
shimmer of a butterflys wings or the more prosaic spectrum reflected off a thin layer of oil on
pavement you gave an intellectual nod to the underlying quantum mechanical principles which
give rise to these phenomena and then went on about your day just like it was 1904 (the year
before Einsteins four seminal papers revolutionized the world of physicsmany other worlds
are still playing catch up).
Now, quantum mechanics is, without a doubt, one of the best theories ever produced by
human minds. The effects of QM are likewise undeniable in their scope, and have reached every
corner of the Earth, influencing the course of the 20th century immeasurably, mostly through the
various technologies it has made possible (from computers and just about everything electronic
transistors, anyone?to advances in medicine, communications, manufacturing, and more).
But the problem here is that relatively only a very few individuals need to understand principles
of QM for all of this to be possible, while the rest of us can simply make or use the resulting
technologies without ever changing our epistemology. My cell phone works just fine whether I
understand how it works, just as I can see my computer screen perfectly well, even though if I
wish to understand how this is possible, a number of quantum principles are required. Heck,
even the scientists who understand and apply the principles of QM in new and ingenious ways
arent required to change their epistemologythe fundamental assumptions upon which their
knowledge and actions are basedthey can simply use the principles logically to predict future
experiments.
But this leads us to an interesting pointaptly made by one of the greatest physicists of
all time, Richard Feynman, who said: I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum
mechanics (Feynman, 1965). Now if someone who has won the Nobel Prize in physics for

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developing quantum electrodynamics doesnt understand his own field, what hope do we have
that its principles can precipitate an epistemological shift at all, let alone do so for your average
person? Lets take a look at why Feynman can say something like thisand mean itbecause
this will help throw some light on the issue.
Part 1: Why we dont understand quantum mechanics
Rather than being facetious, Feynman is attempting to point out a subtle but important
issue that arises when we try to understanding QM: the way the world works on a quantum scale
is nothing like how it appears to us on an everyday scale. The entirety of our daily experience
occurs in ways that belie the existence of the laws operative at the quantum level. In other
words, we dont experience the principles of quantum mechanics at work in any direct way, nor
can we, because all our sensory and conceptual tools have evolved to deal with the vastly larger
scale on which human experience plays out.
Humans seem to experientially occupy a meso-scale realm between the quantum and the
relativistic. We are the peanut butter and jelly sandwiched between two infinite slices of bread:
one infinitely large, the other infinitely small. Yet our uncanny ability to think logically (and
therefore mathematically) has led us to formulate theories of these other realms which are not
otherwise accessible to our thinking. This is to say that the closest we can get to really
understanding the quantum (or alternatively, relativistic) scales of the universe is by virtue of the
logic of the maths that describe such scales.
Humans dont do so well when we are forced to understand something solely in terms of
its logical relations; we want, and perhaps need something more visceral in the experience of
understanding, something we can relate to. But this is just the problem: as soon as we try to
think about what it is like for the universe to have the strange relations that the mathematics of
QM implies, our thoughts simply fail its principles; we cant do them justice through the way we
normally experience the world.
What it is like is a question that has embedded within it a particular kind of
epistemologyone thoroughly embedded within and adapted to the normal scale of human
experience. As soon as we attempt to step outside the formal logical relations embodied in the
mathematics in order to translate or understand what the relations really mean or signify for our
experience of the universe, we necessarily dispose of (at least some of) the very elements we are
trying to keep intact. Quantum weirdness is quantum weirdness; translating it into terms,
images, or metaphors that can be understood by your average person (although, if Feynman is
right, it doesnt matter at all who you are) makes the quantum weirdness into normal weirdness,
capable of being dealt with through all the normal epistemological modes we have been using to
deal with the normal, Newtonian scale of things.
Feynmans unequivocal statement is a stark wake-up call: we can manipulate the
mathematical symbols in accordance with the rules which allow us to properly predict the results

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of experiments (no test of QM has ever failed to uphold these rules yet), but we simply are not
built in such a way as to be able to understand what these rules mean, because questions of
meaning necessarily fall within the scale of experiences that are actually available to human
consciousness. In other words, you cant imagine the impossible, because if you can it has
already been subjected to the rules and limitations embedded in the epistemology underlying
your imagination (regardless of whether these have any reality outside your imagination). Only
the unimagined is truly impossible, lying outside the realm of consciousness altogether.
Okay, fine. We dont understand the meaning of quantum mechanics in situ; we can
simply calculate results of quantum-scale experiments and use them to our benefit, and thats the
end of the story or is it?
Part 2: Why we do understand quantum mechanics
The Copenhagen interpretation of QM, spearheaded by Niels Bohr, invites us to make
statements about reality only when an actual experiment has been performed, and then we are
only allowed to say what occurred as a result of the experiment. This is because questions about
the universe that are not actually answered experimentally are meaningless questions (this has
been characterized as the shut up and calculate approach by David Mermin). Why? Because
reality is something only by virtue of the particular questions we ask of it; i.e. the experiments
we perform. Outside the context of such experiments, we must simply be silent, because the
answer to a question depends on how you ask it. Ask it one way, you get one answer; ask it
another way, you get a completely different answer.
Now, human as he was, Bohr couldnt help but extrapolate this view into a full-fledged
principle called complementarity. This principle states that the universe can exhibit multiple,
seemingly contradictory manifestations, but not simultaneously. Actual experiments determine
whether reality will be one way or the other. Unfortunately for Bohr, making this statement
violates the very principle he is attempting to uphold: he is making a generalization about how
the universe really operates, but doing so without an actual experiment. Indeed, the principle of
complementarity itself, by its own formulation, cannot come from experiment, but must be an
interpretation of at least two experiments whose results are contradictory. This is to say that
Bohr, and those who insist that physics doesnt deal with ontological questions (Shhhh! Back to
your calculators!), are simply deluding themselves. This is okay, because it also simply means
that such people are human after all.
So Bohr, the foremost champion of keeping our thinking and language clean with respect
to attempts at interpreting QM nevertheless does so himself. He extrapolates from the
mathematics and arrives at a principle, strange as it may be to normal experience, that is at least
understandable there: how I approach the world plays a not insignificant role in how the world
appears to me.

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But here we are presented with the complementary side to the coin presented in part 1:
the possibility that we can approach the world in such a way as to draw out aspects of the world
which would otherwise be unavailable to us. Specifically, maybe it is possible that the realm of
quantum mechanics can be approached not solely mathematically, but in other ways as well
perhaps in ways that allow us to experience it more directly than at first seems possible.
Approaching it in such a way reveals something different than would be the case if one stuck
fervently to the pure logical formulations of the underlying principles, but this does not
necessarily mean that the resulting understanding is simply wrong or irrelevant.
There is room for hope here, on at least two fronts. The first front has roots in what is
known as the measurement problem in quantum physics. The rules of QM have no implicit
scale of operation: the laws can apply to systems of any size (although we can only do
approximations for even the smallest systems because of the infinite complexity involved: for
example, calculating the influences on a single electron would ultimately require taking into
account every other electron in the universe; this would make one very late for dinner). In other
words, there does not seem to be in the rules of QM itself any place where, when looking at a
system of just slightly larger size, it apologetically shrugs at the experimenter and says Sorry,
chap, I get real tired at scales over a few nanometers; cant you just use Newtons stuff from here
on up? No, if there are any limitations, they seem to be ours; we give up long before the math
does.
Given this situation, the previous argument that we dont experience things on a quantum
scale and thus can never really understand QM may have a tiny loophole: presumably the whole
world operates by the principles of quantum mechanics, including sensory and conceptual tools
we use to experience the world. Now, granted, this is an arguable point: it may be that there is no
inherent connection between the underlying quantum mechanical rules on which our thinking
processes are based and our ability to understand those rules. Perhaps the ability to think about
QM is an emergent property that, while relying for its very existence on quantum mechanical
processes, is far enough removed from them as to completely miss them when they pass by on
the street.
This may not be as big a problem as it first appears, however. ALL thinking is removed
from its foundations, considered physically. Nevertheless, we have evolved to a point where we
can understand quite a lot about these very foundations, an understanding owed to an
advancement in thinking and to an extension of perception. To say that our experience is
somehow ultimately limited to a very particular scale (between a tiny speck of dust and the
distant horizon, between a fraction of a second and many years) because these scales are the only
ones directly amenable to experience is likely to be simply wrong.
Human ingenuity has provided us with tools that extend both our conceptual capacities
(QM not the least among these), as well as our sensual capacities (both through application of
technologies as well as through the ability to self-transformmore about this in a minute). It is

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the combination of conceptual and perceptual capacities that gives us hope in regards to our
ability to understand, in a non-trivialized way, the principles of quantum mechanics.
When I first had a chance to look through a good telescope at the planet Saturn, I was
struck by how much it looked exactly like someone cut out a tiny picture of the planet from an
astronomy book and pasted it at the end of the telescope. It was an odd experience: to see
something in person for the first time that looked so much like itself that it seemed fake; it was
just too real to be, well, real. Now, if I didnt know that Saturn was millions and millions of
miles away, I would have trusted my senses which were telling me that the image was a tiny
cutout about four feet away from my eyeball. This would be a case of my thinking becoming
subject to my perception. But because I did have prior concepts about Saturn, in this case my
thinking modified my perception, so that ultimately the combination of the two (where knowing
takes place) allowed me to have a much more accurate visual sense of its true distance and size.
The point is that both thinking and perception are fluid and malleable; they mutually
modify each other to create a space in which new knowing can happen that otherwise would be
inaccessible, as was probably the situation in the famous (and at least partly apocryphal1) case of
those who looked through Galileos telescope without seeing the moons of Jupiter.
This, then, is the second front of attack: we human beings are capable of real and radical
change and evolution, both in our thinking and in our perception. The ideas of quantum
mechanics have been around only for a century, an insignificantly tiny portion of the span of
human development as a whole. Yet even in that time our understanding has advanced
considerably, and not just through sheer logical manipulation. It takes human creativity to
suggest places that look promising for exploration in the quantum tunnels (if youll forgive the
pun). Physicists even speak of a sort of quasi-magical intuition that is both innate and capable
of being developed which suggests how to think about things in new ways that lead to interesting
insights, experiments, and theories. Feynman was something of a master at this.
Inconclusion
Now lets put this all together, or at least overlap things a bit. Humans seem primed by
instinct to deal with Newtonian scale events, which occupy the vast bulk of our lives. But we are
also primed with the capacity to change our capacities through a variety of means, both
externally and internally. We have been thinking about thinking for at least two or three
millennia, and have arguably made considerable progress with how we understand our
understanding. That techniques for modifying understanding (esoteric technologies, we could
call them) can produce experiences that lie far outside normal scales of everyday life seems to
give testament to the human ability of overcoming our built-in limitations. Perhaps the
numerous accounts of trans-personal experiences (among which experiences of the infinitely
large and the infinitely small in both space and time are not the least important, if youll pardon
1 http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2006/11/who-refused-to-look-through-galileos.html

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an even worse pun) are possible precisely because of QM? Maybe these types of experiences
could even be considered just as direct in regards to the quantum mechanical realm as an
experience of throwing a baseball is with regards to the Newtonian realm?
We have also extended our outer sensory capacities through various technological
means, which has opened up whole new worlds to experience. With corresponding changes in
our conceptual abilities, human beings seem capable of moving past the Newtonian scales that
otherwise bind our experience. As an example, even if we personally have never seen them, we
can easily imagine a whole realm of germs, parasites, and viruses that cannot be seen with the
naked eye, and whats more, we actually live our lives with this realm partly in mind.
It doesnt seem like we have evolved to understand QM, even if we have evolved with
and even because of QM, at least in part. But sewn into the very fabric of this tapestry is the
thread of its own unraveling: evolution isnt over, and may indeed be speeding up and changing
course in ways we have barely begun to imagine. It seems much too hasty to declare that our
present inability to directly understand the science of QM will remain true for even the relatively
close future.
The whole history of humanity shows us, over and over again, how human understanding
has changed and adapted with the types of sensations, environments, and capacities that are both
unconsciously encountered and consciously developed. Quantum mechanics is so recent we
have barely (collectively, that is) sat down next to it at the bar, let alone asked it out in a date.
How could we be expected to know what it would be like if we moved in together, not to
mention that out of the corner of our eye we keep seeing sexy string theory (or mysterious Mtheory) throwing meaningful glances our way? Perhaps Feynman would agree with the
uncertainty (and thus openness) of our future; his statement was in the present tense, after all.
Human epistemologies are adaptive and flexible. They are also capable of reorganization
on the basis of intent, at least to some extent. It may be that the appearance of present limits to
understanding are temporary, or at least amenable to shifts. New ways of experiencing the
universe, both conceptually and perceptually, provide the opportunity to explore new modes of
knowing, which do not necessarily retain the limits imposed upon us by our innate biology. Our
biology, in a sense, can be extended; our consciousness can be extended as well. Some curious
fellows seem to have been exploring this kind of extension for thousands of years, but the rise of
technological methods for extending perceptual capacities (and the corresponding conceptual
advances) have created a completely new situation in this respect with regards so experiences
available to the average person.
The extent to which humans can embody and enact new epistemologies on the basis of
changing perceptual and cognitive resources is unknown. But it does seem that a dynamic set of
possibilities lies between the two extremes, allowing at least a partial ability by which humans
create situations that lead to significant changes in the way we conceptualize and interact with
the world. Quantum mechanics may very well contribute to such a shifting. The situation, like a
quantum wave-function, is continuing to evolve through an vast array of superpositions. Maybe

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once we get to first base the wave-function will collapse and well have a picture of where the
relationship is headed; for now, though, it looks like were still flirting at the bar.

References
Feynman, R. P. (1965). The character of physical law. Cambridge,: M.I.T. Press.